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Roger Ebert Dead at 70 After Long Battle With Cancer

He was probably the most famous film critic alive, and certainly the most prolific. He loved movies so much, he kept on watching them and writing about them every day long after an aggressive thyroid cancer ate away his jaw. Now, after a return of the cancer, Roger Ebert is dead at age 70.

Ebert was many things, but he was first and foremost a newspaper film critic. In his 46 years at the Chicago Sun-Times, he reviewed thousands of films. His final review was of “The Host,” an adaptation of the novel by “Twilight” author Stephenie Meyer. He gave it two and a half stars.

But it was through his long-running syndicated TV show that he became known to America, his thumb a national icon. The show went through several evolutions but will forever be remembered as “Siskel and Ebert At the Movies.” He and his co-host, Gene Siskel, had a prickly chemistry and an easy visual hook — Ebert short and plump, Siskel tall and thin — that pair-bonded them in the public mind as tightly as Laurel and Hardy or R2D2 and C3PO. Siskel died even younger, at age 53 in 1999, and while Ebert struck up a successful new partnership with Richard Roeper, they never captured the same magic.

It helped, of course, that Siskel and Ebert joined forced in 1975, at the height of the golden age of American cinema. “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Dog Day Afternoon” make for classic criticism in a way that “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” doesn’t quite. It was also the year that Ebert won print journalism’s most prestigious honor, the Pulitzer Prize, for his columns published the year before.

But while he loved the romance of newspapering as a trade and spent his whole life a couple hours from the small town where he grew up, Ebert was never the kind to be anchored to the past. In recent years, he cultivated new audiences with his avid blogging, winning a person of the year award at the Webbies “in honor of his contributions to the craft of online writing and journalism.” He also tweeted often and had more than 800,000 Twitter followers.

It was on his blog that Ebert announced, just a few days ago, his intention to take what he termed “a leave of presence” to cope with his deteriorating health. He promised to keep writing, about movies and all the other topics on which he was accustomed to lavishing his capacious, warm intelligence. “ [O]n bad days I may write about the vulnerability that accompanies illness,” he wrote. “On good days, I may wax ecstatic about a movie so good it transports me beyond illness.”

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